How to unlock Animal Crossing Slumber Islands and how they work

Animal Crossing Slumber Islands let you decorate completely new islands using all the items you've gathered in New Horizons without affecting your main island. It's effectively a sandbox construction mode that you might want to use to test out building ideas for your main island or create elaborate projects. Since you can immediately pull items you've previously obtained, it's much quicker to decorate on a Slumber Island, but there are also plenty of limitations to be aware of. With that in mind, I've laid out everything there is to know about Slumber Islands, including how to unlock them and what you can do on them.

How to create a Slumber Island in Animal Crossing

To start making a Slumber Island, you need to lay on a bed in your house and choose 'It's slumber time' from the list of options that pop up.

However, there are quite a few requirements to meet for this option to actually pop up, which are as follows:

• You must have the Animal Crossing New Horizons 3.0 update installed.
• An active Nintendo Switch Online subscription.
• Your console must be connected to the internet to create or visit a Slumber Island.
• Access to Luna, which also means your island must have a rating of at least three stars, and you must have visited one of her Dream Islands.

Assuming you meet all the above criteria, you should have a letter in your mailbox from Luna that tells you to go to sleep to access a new area of dream space.

Back to slumber time. You'll then nod off to meet Luna, who will then help you create your Slumber Island, which involves picking its size and layout. For sizes, your options are small, medium, or large, where small is the same as a mystery island, large is the same size as your regular island, and medium is in between. As for layouts, there are always four options, with three of them being a somewhat random arrangement of terrain and rivers while the fourth is just a plain, flat island with a minimal amount of water or none at all.

Once you've chosen those two things, you'll be taken to your newly generated island and can start building and decorating. Remember that your regular inventory is gone while on a Slumber Island, replaced with a set of basic tools, but all your gear will come back to you when you wake up. That obviously means you can't take anything with you to a Slumber Island, but you'll have access to anything you need via the island's item collection anyway.

In future slumber time sessions, you can choose to visit your existing Slumber Island or create a new one, which will take you through the above island creation process again. Bear in mind that you can have up to three Slumber Islands, so you could have one of each size or even three large ones. When choosing which island to visit, you can also delete and copy your islands if you wish.

What you can do on an Animal Crossing Slumber Island

Now that you're on a clean-slate Slumber Island, here’s a rundown of the sorts of things you can do to make it a dreamy, deserted island:

• Name the island: Speak to Luna to give your Slumber Island a proper name.
• Place any item you've previously obtained: Press D-Pad Right to open your item collection, letting you see every furniture item, plant, fashion item, and creature you've ever owned. You can then select from the list to place them on your Slumber Island as decorations. You can also place residents, which includes your current and former villagers (which might make for an awkward reunion). Sadly, interacting with them just causes them to wave at you.
• Decorate your house: Every Slumber Island gets a duplicate of your house from your main island. The exterior is identical, but the interior is completely blank. You can decorate it with all your obtained furniture items, wallpaper, flooring and more, just like the Hotel's rooms and Happy Home Paradise rooms.
• Terraform the land, lay paths, and put fences: Exactly like using the Island Designer app on your main island, you can press the + button followed by X to switch to fence-placing mode to put up fences or the Island Designer menu, letting you use the land Waterscaping Permit and Cliff-Construction Permit spades as well as the usual path laying options. Note that if you try to use the Island Designer app on a Slumber Island, it will instead activate the cleanup service, which removes trees, furniture, fences, and rocks that are next to you, similar to the Animal Crossing Resetti Reset Service.
• Construct bridges and alter your house: Speak to Lloid and you'll be able to use his building knowhow to quickly construct bridges and inclines, move or renovate your house, and get pitfall seeds and gold nuggets. The best part is these construction projects happen instantly and cost nothing.
• Invite friends to your island: Speak to Luna and she can help you invite friends to your Slumber Island or create a Doze Code to share, exactly like a Dodo Code on your normal island. As usual, having company means you won't be able to use some of the features on this list.
• Change time of day and weather: Press D-Pad Left to open a small menu that lets you choose which hour of the day you want your Slumber Island to be and whether there is sunshine or precipitation. The island's season is based on your main island's season, however.

When it's time to leave your island, head back to the bed next to Luna and go to sleep. Your island will be saved, and you'll then wake up back on your normal island. As mentioned, if you want to get back to your dream island, you only need to go to sleep and choose 'It's slumber time'!

The 3.0 update also introduced some new Animal Crossing Zelda items to unlock. You can also invite some Animal Crossing Zelda villagers to live on your island!

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